Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment

More Advance Praise for Animal Factory

"The industrial production of farm animals is a grim saga of pollution, health risks, and animal misery. Yet in Animal Factory, David Kirby has put together an ingenious book that is highly readable and engaging. The heroes of his book are fighting for a better America—one in which waters are safe to drink, air is safe to breathe, and traditional family farmers are the sources of our food. Anyone who reads this book will be drawn into their cause."

—Bill Niman, founder of Niman Ranch, and Nicolette Hahn Niman,

author of Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and

Good Food Beyond Factory Farms

"Hurray to David Kirby for exposing the horrific conditions that are so prevalent at America’s factory farms. When I first confronted the realities of factory farming some ten years ago, I knew that I did not want Chipotle’s success to be based on the exploitation that I saw. While few people actually have the chance to see firsthand where their food comes from, Animal Factory provides a vivid account of the system and the harm it causes."

—Steve Ells, founder, chairman, and co-CEO of Chipotle Mexican Grill

David Kirby’s new book points to a deeper story than may be apparent to some. It is easy to blame the farmer, or blame the industry for the unintended consequences of our food system. But there are deeper systemic issues that give rise to these problems that we now need to address. Our ‘fast, convenient, and cheap’ food system gave us benefits that many found praiseworthy. But we failed to anticipate the unintended costs to health, to communities, and to the environment. Perhaps it’s time to reinvent a food system that is resilient, affordable, and health-promoting for both people and land. Perhaps Kirby’s new book can serve as part of a wake-up call for us all to become food citizens to that end.

—Frederick Kirschenmann, president of Kirschenmann Family Farms

ALSO BY DAVID KIRBY

Evidence of Harm

DAVID KIRBY

ANIMAL

FACTORY

THE LOOMING THREAT OF INDUSTRIAL

PIG, DAIRY, AND POULTRY FARMS

TO HUMANS AND THE ENVIRONMENT

ST. MARTIN’S PRESS NEW YORK

ANIMAL FACTORY. Copyright © 2010 by David Kirby.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue,

New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kirby, David, 1960–

Animal factory : the looming threat of industrial pig, dairy, and poultry farms to humans and the environment / David Kirby.—1st ed.

      p. cm.

 ISBN 978-0-312-38058-8

1. Factory farms—Environmental aspects. 2. Factory farms—Health aspects. I. Title.

 TD195.A34K57 2010

 363.7—dc22

2009039692

First Edition: March 2010

10    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

To my only sister, Nancy Bue,

who taught me how to tie my shoes and helped me to

keep walking forward ever since

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Animal factories affect us all, one way or another. But the impact on some is far greater than it is on most. Among those brave and kind people who invited me into their homes and spent a good deal of time sharing their stories about factory farming—and its alternatives—were Karen and Rocky Hudson, Rick and Joanne Dove, Helen Reddout, Chris and Kristi Petersen, Terry and Linda Spence, Barbara Sha Cox and Dan Cox, Nina Baird, Charlie Tebbutt and Karen Murphy, Bill Niman and Nicole Hahn Niman, Diane and Donny Ward, Kim Ward and Dan Trent, Lynne and Doug Henning, Jordan West, and though I did not make it to her home, Carole Morison.

But those are just some of the people who spent time with me in person, on the phone, or in e-mail conversations. At the near-certain risk of omitting individuals who helped me (my apologies in advance), I want to extend deepest thanks to the following citizens.

In Washington State, there was Mary Lynne Bos, Doug and JoEtte Moore, Jim and Linda Dyjak, Jan Whitefoot, Linda and Kin Cornwall, Florence Howard, Jerald and Lorre Gefre, Larry Fendell, Wally Almagauer and Gene Martin. In North Carolina, Don Webb, Devon Hall and Dothula Baron-Hall and their friend and colleague Elsie, Gary Grant, Neuse Riverkeeper Larry Baldwin, Diane Baldwin, State Rep. Carolyn Justice, and the Raleigh staff of North Carolina Environmental Defense. In Illinois, Nancy Crosby and her family, Diana Smith and Angie Litterst.

In Indiana, Mike Platt, Dianne Richardson, Bonnie Hahn, Sharon Adcock, Allen Hutchison, Ron Chalfant, Tony Goldstein, Jerry Carter, Courtney Justice, Rick Hughes, Seth Slaybaugh, State Rep. Phillip Pflum, State Rep. Tom Saunders, Phil Bir, Bill Grant, Bob and Barbara Hedges, Pat Pichon, Ira Johnson, Jean Witcomb, Gary and Julie Alexander, Bud Ashton, Mike Appleby, Kathryn Petry, Sandra Dalzell, Melinda Thomas, Nell Comer, Jetta Dungan, Barbara Pegg, Alan Hamilton, and Barbara Artinian. And special thanks to Andrew Miller, former director of the Indiana Department of Agriculture, and Thomas Easterly, commissioner of the Indiana Department of Environmental Management.

In Iowa, Lisa Whelan of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement and the Simmons family of Kirkfield. In Michigan, Kathy Melmoth, John and Peggy Zachel, Lighthawk pilot Ed Steinman, local Sierra Club activist John Klein, and Floyd and Mary Lou McVay. In Arkansas, attorney Jason Hatfield and clients Beth and Mike Green, William and Virginia Vavakos, Whitney Green, Beverly and Tommy Johnson, Sue Mobley, Bob Smith, Carol Fidler, Wendy Wood-Wolber, Chris Rasco, and Lisa Stills. In Oklahoma, Ed Brocksmith, John Ellis, L. D. Stephens, and state attorney general Drew Edmundson. In Texas, Robert Bernays, Waco assistant city manager Wiley Stem, and former Waco mayor Linda Etheridge. In Ohio, Jane Phillips, Dave Weiss, and Dave Blessing, and in California, Bill Jennings, Tom France, and from the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, Brent Newel, Lupe Martinez, and Daniela Simunovic, who graciously drove me around the San Joaquin Valley.

From the august world of academy, I heartily thank people at the Center for a Livable Future and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health, including Ellen Silbergeld; Shaw McKenzie and Ralph Loglisci, formerly of the Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Practices; JoAnn Burkholder of North Carolina State University at Raleigh; Steve Wing of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Larry Cahoon and Mike Malkin of UNC, Wilmington; Kendall Thu of Northern Illinois University; and Donald Boesch, of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. At Purdue University, I wish to thank Rod Allrich, Paul Ebner, Donald Lay, Ed Pajor, Allen Schinckel, and others. Other very special thanks go to David Wallinga of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and John Ikerd of the University of Missouri. Finally, Robert Martin at the Pew Environment Group and former executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Production, Fred Kirschenmann of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, and Robert Lawrence, of the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins donated time and attention to help with the manuscript in its final stages.

Many from the world of nonprofit environmental, farming, and public-health advocacy also helped out with this effort, including Natalie Roy of the Clean Water Network, Dan Klotz of Keep Antibiotics Working, Margaret Mellon of the Union of Concerned Scientists, Michelle Merkel of the Waterkeeper Alliance, Diane Hatz of Sustainable Table, Ed Hopkins of the Sierra Club, Karla Raettig of the Environmental Integrity Project, Ken Cook of the Environmental Working Group, Martha Noble of the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, and Mary Thomas of the Farm Foundation.

Among the producers, CAFO operators, and animal agriculture industry representatives, I truly appreciate the time and effort extended by Chuck Stokes, Don Lloyd, Malcolm DeKryger, Mike Beard, Randy Curless, Julia Wickard, Cecilia Vander Hoff-Conway, Art and Marion Venema, Richard Lobb of the National Chicken Council, and Don Parrish and Kelly Ludlum of the American Farm Bureau Foundation.

Several attorneys gave me their insights into filing nuisance and other lawsuits against CAFOs, including Ralph Epstein, Richard Middleton, and Fred Roth.

Very special thanks go to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who inspired me to write this book when he told me about the cancer situation among the residents of Prairie Grove, Arkansas; Bill Wieda of the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project; Deirdre Imus and Don Imus, who had me on his show to discuss the possible origins of swine flu; the Bono family of Durham; Arianna Huffington and the entire Huffpost crew; Sandy Goldstein; Marisela Taylor of the Western Environmental Law Center (WELC), for her wonderful assistance while I was working in Eugene; and Sue Haney, the former court reporter from the Yakima Valley who pulled out the e-transcripts of the CARE v. Bosma trial from her archives and gave them to WELC free of charge. I also want to recognize and appreciate the thousands of parents of children with autism who read my first book and have been terrifically supportive in anticipation of this one.

My family and friends have been of limitless value, including my parents, Barbara and Leo, my sister Nancy Bue and her great kids, Jennifer and Michael Bue, plus Matthew Singer, Gabriel Rotello, Rob Arnold, and Natalie Aaron in California, and on the East Coast, Doug, Art, and Judy Fredman; Lou Pansulla; David France; Shimon Attie; Laura Perry; Bob Lenartz and Patty Glynn-Lenartz; Johnny Ramos; Jane Berliner; Georges Piette; and Sasha Silverstein. Jay Blotcher provided extremely able and helpful editing prior to submission (contact me for his contact info), Nancy Hokkanen was my fearless and intrepid transcriber, and I will forever be indebted to my wonderful agent, Todd Shuster, and the world-class team at St. Martin’s Press, including my editor George Witte, Rachel Ekstrom, Tara Cibelli, Terra Gerstner, Julie Gutin, and Sara Sarver. I also want to thank Carlos Jimeno, who helped me through the very toughest parts of writing a very tough book, and kept me sane and laughing in those moments when I wanted to abandon ship.

Finally, I think everyone should give a moment of thanks to the beautiful animals who populate our farms. Whether raised in industrial settings or pristine pastures, they help to sustain all of us (except the strictest of vegans) with their constant supply of meat, milk, and eggs.

farm \ färm\ 1. n.—a tract of land, usually with a house, barn, silo, etc., on which crops and often livestock are raised for livelihood

factory \ fak-t( -)r \ 1. n.—a building or group of buildings with facilities to manufacture a uniform product, without concern for individuality

INTRODUCTION

MAY 27, 2009

Many Americans have no idea where their food comes from, and many have no desire to find out.

That is unfortunate.

Every bite we take has had some impact on the natural environment, somewhere in the world. As the planet grows more crowded, and more farmers turn to industrialized methods to feed millions of new mouths, that impact will only worsen.

The willful ignorance of our own food’s provenance is curious, given our Discovery Channel–like fascination with the way in which everything else in our modern world is made. Some consumers will spend hours online reading up on cars, cosmetics, or clothes, searching out the most meticulously crafted or environmentally healthy products they can find, then run down to the supermarket and load their carts with bacon, butter, chicken, and eggs without thinking for a second where—or how—any of those goods were produced.

This is starting to change, of course. More Americans are coming to realize that the modern production of food—especially to provide for our affluent, protein-rich diet—has a direct and sometimes negative impact on the environment, the well-being of animals, rural communities, and human health itself. Some have joined in a contemporary consumer revolt of sorts that has put the corporate food industry on the defensive in recent years.

At the center of the storm are the large-scale, mechanized megafarms where hundreds of thousands of cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys are fed and fattened for market, all within the confines of enclosed buildings or crowded outdoor lots.

Government and industry call these massive compounds confined [or concentrated] animal feeding operations, or CAFOs (usually pronounced KAY-fohs), though most people know them simply as factory farms. Chances are you have seen them from above, while flying in an airplane: long white buildings lined up in tightly packed rows of three, four, or many more.

CAFOs are where most of our animal protein—our milk, cheese, butter, yogurt, eggs, chicken, turkey, bacon, sausage, cold cuts, ribs, pork chops, and, increasingly, beef and fish—comes from these days. Old MacDonald’s farm—with his big red barn and clucking chicks in the yard—is quickly fading away into a romanticized past. Today, MacDonald would most likely be working as a contract grower for some conglomerate, raising tens of thousands of animals inside giant enclosures according to strict instructions dictated by the company, which typically owns the livestock but is not responsible for the thousands of tons of waste left behind before the survivors are trucked off to slaughter.

Large companies with kitchen-table names like Perdue, Tyson, Smithfield, Cargill, ADM, and Land O’Lakes now control much of the poultry and livestock production in the United States. They own the animals, they control the all-important processing and packing plants, they often operate their own distribution networks, and they sell an array of brands to consumers in the supermarket.

This vertical integration model of production—some would call it an old-fashioned, illegal trust in need of a Teddy Roosevelt–style buster—leaves small and independent growers at such an obvious disadvantage that many of them give up animal agriculture altogether. Two percent of U.S. livestock facilities now raise 40 percent of all animals,¹ and the vast majority of pigs, chickens, and dairy cows are produced inside animal factories.²

Livestock and poultry are very big business in America. Like all industries, agribusiness has barons that wield extraordinary political and economic clout, with billions at their disposal to spend on K Street lobbying, local and national political campaigns, saturation advertising, feel-good PR (see: California, happy cows), and other means of creating a favorable business climate for themselves.

And like many big industries, factory farms are major contributors to air, water, and land pollution. Science and government have concluded without a doubt that CAFOs are responsible for discharging millions of tons of contaminants from animal manure into the environment every year—much of it illegally.

Unlike the steel, auto, or coal industries, livestock operations are not subject to the same stringent rules, regulations, laws, and controls on environmental discharges. After all, what could be more important than the guarantee of an abundant, safe, and affordable food supply? What could be more sacrosanct in American legend and law than the farms and farmers who make sure our food gets to the national dinner table night after night?

Besides, how could a farm be considered a factory? There are no smokestacks on a farm. There are no chemical plants or refineries, and very few vehicles. Where, then, is all that supposed pollution coming from, and how much of a problem could there actually be?

Consider this:

Each year, the United States produces more than one ton of dry matter (the portion remaining after water is removed) animal waste for every resident,³ and animal feeding operations yield one hundred times more waste than all U.S. human sewage treatment plants.⁴

While human sewage is treated to kill pathogens, animal waste is not. Hog manure has ten to one hundred times more concentrated pathogens than human waste,⁵ yet the law would never permit untreated human waste to be kept in vast lagoons, or sprayed onto fields, as is the case with manure.

Manure can contain pathogens, antibiotics, drug-resistant bacteria, hormones, heavy metals, and other compounds that can seriously impact human health, aquatic life, and wildlife when introduced into the environment, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay produces one million tons of manure a year, enough to fill a football stadium to the top row, including all the concourses, locker rooms, and concession areas.⁶

Agricultural waste is the number-one form of well-water contaminants in the United States, where at least 4.5 million people are exposed to dangerously high nitrate levels in their drinking water.⁷

A Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study of well water in nine Midwestern states showed that 13 percent of the supply had nitrate levels above the EPA standard of ten milligrams per liter.⁸

Feedlot odors contain some 170 separate chemicals,⁹ many of them known to cause respiratory ailments, diarrhea, depression, violent behavior, and other health problems.

Rearing cattle produces more greenhouse gases than cars, a UN report warns.¹⁰

Animal-factory proponents say that CAFOs are the most cost-effective method in the world of producing meat, milk, and eggs. They credit modern American agriculture with yielding the cheapest food in human history—which is hard to refute—and also the safest, which is debatable.

Animal industrialists say that by confining poultry and livestock to CAFOs—as opposed to letting them roam free on ranges, pastures, and fields—they are providing warm and clean environments where farm animals can thrive, free from the threats of the elements, predators, or even attacks from other farm animals. The delivery of food, water, and veterinary care becomes more efficient, they contend, and animals can be moved more quickly to market, increasing profitability.

Besides, according to these industrialists, consumers demand cheap, lean, uniform cuts of meat, and using CAFOs is the only possible way to deliver that.

But animal-factory opponents, whose ranks are growing—they are not only consumers, but scientists, politicians, and farmers, as well—charge that the only way CAFO production can be profitable is by passing along, or externalizing, certain costs associated with raising so many animals in such a small place.

In 2008, the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production released a landmark report on CAFOs. It reached some very sobering conclusions about their impact on our health, the environment, rural communities, farm workers, food safety, animal welfare, and the looming threat of evolving microbes—including antibiotic-resistant E. coli, MRSA, and, of course, swine flu virus.

The Pew report reminds us that the price of protein, given the externalities of animal-factory production, often goes well beyond the price tag in your grocer’s aisle.

These ‘externalities’ may include anything from changes in property values near industrial farming operations, to health costs from polluted air, water, and soil, and spreading resistant infections or diseases of animal origin, to environmental degradation or cleanup costs—all of which are ‘paid’ by the public, the Pew Commission said, even though they are not included in the cost of producing or buying the meat, poultry, eggs, and milk that modern industrial animal agriculture provides.¹¹

Animal Factory is not strictly an anti-CAFO book, though many in the agricultural community will perceive it that way. I do not call for an end to industrial animal production, nor do I draw any personal conclusions myself. Informed consumers—whether of food or of information—are vital to a healthy democracy. I would never dream of telling people what to eat or, more important, what not to eat. But we all have a responsibility, even an ethical obligation, to know where our food comes from, and what impact its production has on the environment and public health, before we take it home and fry it up in a pan.

Wherever possible, I have tried to include voices from the animal-production industry and other CAFO supporters. Many farmers believe that industrial animal production is the only option open to them if they are to remain in farming, and they are grateful to the large companies for providing steady contracts and a stable economic environment for them to survive.

One powerful argument for agribusiness is that it offers a lower retail price of food to shoppers. For consumers, factory-farmed meat, milk, and eggs are usually considerably more affordable than their organic, free-range, or sustainably produced counterparts. Most working families do not have the luxury of buying high-end, boutique protein. Some opponents of CAFOs would counterargue that families should simply cut down on the animal products they buy.

I am not a vegetarian, and you will occasionally find me in line for fast food, so I have no business telling others how to eat. Food—like sex, politics, and religion—is an intensely personal, emotional, and complicated subject.

Moreover, farmers are not evil people. The farmers I got to know, including those who operate CAFOs, seemed to genuinely care about the environment, the animals, their communities, and the quality and safety of the food they produced.

On the other hand, I cannot dismiss or forget what I witnessed firsthand in my three years of reporting this story. I met with people living within smelling distance of animal factories in the chicken belts of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia, in the hog belt of North Carolina, in the upper Midwestern CAFO states of Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio, and in the arid western dairy regions of Texas, central California, and the Yakima Valley of Washington.

Everywhere I went, the story was the same: CAFOs had fouled the air, spoiled the water, threatened property values, changed the face of local agriculture, and made life miserable for thousands of people, though certainly not everybody.

Sadly, I could only tell a fraction of the stories I heard. This book is not an encyclopedic history of all forms of animal production in the United States. Many people, for example, will notice and perhaps criticize the paucity of information about the raising of beef cattle and farmed fish in America. Though I am not trying to somehow clear beef of any responsibility, I do think that its production is the least problematic of all CAFO-related protein; most U.S. beef cattle are still owned and raised by independent producers—on open pasture, grassland, or through grazing permits on federal land—and spend only the last few months of their lives being fattened on grain in massive feedlots, which most certainly qualify as CAFOs, with all their attendant environmental issues. (Another reason I did not write about beef feedlots more is that, aside from residents of Yakima Valley, they were not an issue for any of the people I profiled.)

As for fish farms, they certainly present challenges that keep some environmentalists up at night, including farmed-salmon escapees that introduce harmful pests such as sea lice and viral diseases that infect wild fish populations. One could write an entire book on the environmental impact of fish farms alone. On the other hand, I have never heard anyone complain about foul odors or noxious gases coming from fish farms.

Animal factories of every stripe are currently under fire. So what does that mean for the future of CAFOs? Will they be reformed into universal acceptability? Will they be litigated into oblivion? Will they be driven out of the country? The truth is, none of those things is likely.

Only time will tell how this dramatic saga plays out. But humankind may not have the last word on whether CAFOs will be with us in twenty years.

That decision will belong to nature.

And nature did not intend for animals to live by the hundreds or thousands, crammed together inside buildings, raised with pharmaceutical products, with no access to grass, sunlight, or the clean, healthy scent of outdoor air.

ANIMAL FACTORY

PROLOGUE

NEW BERN, NORTH CAROLINA

The first time Rick Dove saw a hog factory, it was from a thousand feet up in the air. Finally, the carnage he had witnessed on the ground began to make some sense.

The fifty-three-year-old retired marine JAG and grizzled Vietnam vet was embarking on a new mission, perhaps the most important mission in his life. The flight he took that muggy afternoon over the coastal plains of North Carolina would change everything. Rick would finally understand what was killing the river. His river, a river called the Neuse.

Rick and his family had lived for years near the broad, muddy mouth of the river. Their home was built on the Neuse—the river was the family’s backyard pool. The Neuse (pronounced noose) sprouts from a reservoir below Durham and, 275 miles to the southeast, discharges its contents into the cloudy waters of Pamlico Sound.

With his steely gaze, silver hair, broad face, and sturdy frame, Rick looked every bit the retired Marine Corps prosecutor, out hunting down prey.

On this warm day in 1993, Rick had paid two hundred dollars for a bird’s-eye view of the river, hoping it might reveal the secret of what was making the water so sick and killing fish by the millions. He had the mandate; the Riverkeeper Alliance had recently licensed Rick to serve as the Riverkeeper of the Neuse. He had since logged hundreds of hours plowing the brackish waters in his converted fishing boat, the Lonesome Dove, searching for illegal runoff from factories, sewers, and farms along the banks. He had found some violations, but nothing to explain the massacre of marine life ravishing this sleepy corner of North Carolina.

Something was lurking out there along the waterway. Rick was certain of it. Something had emerged in the last few years, something sinister and foul. Rick had vowed not to rest until he found out what it was—and put an end to it.

The most appalling fish kill had been in September of 1991. Typically, early fall marks the largest migration of the menhaden, a small, tender-fleshed silvery fish with a line of black dots along its flank. Menhaden lay their larvae in the open ocean, which are then washed into the Neuse Estuary, where the fish hatch. From there, young menhaden migrate up to the river basin’s shady creeks and backwaters, where they spend the next several months feeding and growing. Most reassemble in September to swim back out to sea, where they live, spawn, and die. For small fry, they are unfathomably fertile: One mature female can produce over 350,000 offspring.

In 1991, the menhaden were running in numbers that Rick had never seen before. The water grew black with fish as they emerged from their bogs and creeks to gather in the middle of the wide estuary formed by the Neuse. From there, they were genetically wired to swim out to sea. But very few of them made it that year.

Rick first noticed a smattering of dead fish along the riverbanks in the weeks leading up to the run, but nothing too serious. Within the first two days after the fish began migrating, however, the kill was on in full force. Rick and his neighbors woke up one morning to the stench of hundreds of millions of dead menhaden lining the banks for miles. In the following days, bass, stripers, mullets, crabs, and shrimp also turned up dead. They were all pocked with round red sores, as though some specter had sucked the lifeblood from their flesh. Locals puzzled over how to deal with the carnage, but within days most of the rotting flesh had dissolved back into the water.

State inspectors rushed to the scene and ordered a battery of tests. They expected to find that oxygen levels in the river water had been depleted, which is usually caused by a large algal bloom—the usual explanation for fish kills and dead zones. But oxygen levels were normal; something else had wiped out a billion fish at once. The largest fish kill ever recorded on an American river remained a mystery.

One evening soon after the kill, Rick went out to the Neuse with his teenage son, Todd. Together, they sat down on a riverbank, covering their noses against the stench. The river had meant the world to this family. It had given them years of fresh crab and fish. It had provided clean, healthy water for swimming and sailing. Rick sighed and put his arm on his son’s shoulder. The hardened marine fought back a tear.

Everything we loved about this place, Rick said, it’s all over. Inside, he was seething. This old marine had a killer to hunt down; he just wasn’t sure where to look.

A few months later, the New Bern fish kill of ’91 was little more than a bad memory for most people, the more quickly forgotten, the better. But not for Rick Dove. Over the next two years, he would work closely with local scientists, and, eventually, they would finger the killer: a microscopic organism with the bizarrely happy-sounding name of Pfiesteria. This deadly dinoflagellate, Rick was learning, had caused those appalling open sores on the fish.

But this explanation solved only half the murder mystery. Rick still wanted to know why what some called the cell from hell was appearing in numbers large enough to kill a billion fish. Why was it appearing now? And why was it in the Neuse?

The waters of the river would not relinquish the answer, so Rick decided to extend his investigation to the skies. On this first of several hundred sorties, Rick had asked the pilot to fly upstream all the way to Raleigh, the state capital. Outfitted with a high-tech camera and telephoto lens, Rick snapped images of factories, sewage plants, and housing tracts that lined the river. Rick had quickly become an amateur expert in environmental forensics, and he was looking for possible discharges of pollutants—especially nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, which can feed and sustain deadly outbreaks of parasites such as Pfiesteria. But nothing he had seen so far would explain dramatic changes in nutrient levels.

Frustrated but hardly willing to give up, Rick asked the pilot to head back downriver toward New Bern—a historically charming old fishing and timber town dating back to colonial times. One of the oldest settlements in North America, wonderfully preserved New Bern is perched on a sharp elbow of land where the Neuse and Trent rivers merge.

When they reached New Bern, Rick had the pilot head west, up the Trent River. Perhaps something had been built along it, he thought, that was dumping nutrient-laden matter into the water. They headed over neighboring Jones County.

Soon, several large dark ponds of water began to dot the misty green landscape below. They were of differing colors and various angular shapes. Some were black, some brown, and many a shocking shade of magenta, as though they had been filled with Pepto-Bismol. The ponds lay in random patterns across a vast swath of land, like massive swimming pools in a subdivision for giants.

What are those? Rick asked the pilot over the audio system. Some sort of fishponds? Maybe catfish or tilapia farms?

No idea, the pilot crackled back through Rick’s headphones.

The peculiar ponds were adjoined by long, narrow metallic buildings that stretched a hundred yards or so in rows of two to eight or more buildings. As they flew farther west, the weird-looking farms became more concentrated. Even through the haze, Rick could count one hundred or more ponds within his field of vision.

Then the smell hit them.

Noxious gases were infiltrating the aircraft, still potent after traveling upward through a thousand feet of sky. Rick gagged. Whatever was living—or dying—down there, it sure as hell wasn’t fish.

They continued their northwesterly route, passing into Duplin and Sampson counties, among the poorest and most rural in the state. Now the strange longhouses and their ponds filled the landscape in unending succession. One after another after another. Rick continued to snap photos. The farms—or whatever they were—were packed so tightly together that many were wedged in between creeks, canals, and wetlands. Most of that water would find its way into the Neuse, Rick knew. He also noticed big spraying devices—giant sprinklers—on fields surrounding the farms. They were spewing reddish-brown liquid into the air and onto the soil. Some of the spray was caught by the wind and carried aloft as mist; much of it pooled into rivulets on the ground and ran off into nearby waterways. In some areas, sprinklers were spraying brownish water directly into streams.

The wetlands and waterways were choked with green, yellow, and even orange algae. Rick was sickened by the sight of it. This is what hell must look like, he said to the pilot. Let’s heave back to New Bern. I’ve seen enough.

The next morning, Rick called his friend Al Hodge, who worked at the state’s Division of Water Quality. Rick described what he’d seen from the plane. So, he said flatly. What am I looking at?

Pig farms, Al said. The ponds were actually waste lagoons, he explained, and the sprinklers part of a sprayfield in which liquefied pig waste from the lagoon is distributed onto crops—usually Bermuda grass, hay, or corn—that absorb the nutrients.

"Pig farms? Rick laughed. If those are pig farms, then there are millions and millions of pigs living right there in Duplin and Sampson counties."

There might be, Rick. We just don’t know.

"But millions? What would that do to the environment? What about all that surrounding water?"

"We don’t know, because we don’t even know how many pig farms there are. We don’t know where they are. We just have no control over any of it."

Rick was stunned. Well, who the hell can tell me where these things are located, and what they’re doing to the river?

The Department of Ag, Al said, in Raleigh. But trust me, we’ve asked them for that information time and again. They won’t share it with us. It’s some kind of state secret. All they say is to stop breathing down their necks.

Now Rick was steaming mad. But at least the mystery of the Neuse was beginning to unfurl: Pig poop has nutrients; nutrients feed Pfiesteria outbreaks. Pfiesteria kills fish.

Rick smiled, just slightly. He had his suspect. It was time to start prosecuting his case.

YAKIMA VALLEY, WASHINGTON

"My God, what is that?" Helen Reddout shot upright in her bed, wrenched from the hazy dreams of a late-summer sleep. It was the summer of 1996. A stinging odor ricocheted through her nose and coated her mouth and throat. Her eyes were weepy. Helen cupped one hand over her face, fearing she might puke. It smelled as though someone had dumped an entire septic tank right onto the king-size bed. She turned to look at her husband, Don, who was still sleeping, oblivious to the stench invading the bedroom of their handsome two-story, 1920s white-wood farmhouse.

That man would sleep through a tornado, Helen thought, rolling her eyes and frowning. Then she remembered: Every window in the house was open, the better to attract the evening breezes that cool the sun-baked Yakima Valley, 150 miles southeast of Seattle.

There was only one place the stink could have slithered in from, Helen knew. It was those damn milk factories—massive open-lot dairies that had sprung up around the Lower Valley in recent years.

Helen plugged her nose and sprang out of bed to slam shut windows in every room. But it was too late. The stench was already entrapped in the house. She hurried to the bathroom and scanned the shelves, looking for anything to mask the odor. There it was: a dusty bottle of Tabu by Dana, left over from the Carter administration. As a grammar school teacher in her fifties, Helen didn’t have much occasion for the syrupy parfum. But she admired its bottle and had kept it around. Helen plugged her nose and scampered back to the bedroom to begin spraying. Pssshhht, pssshhht. She lifted her hand slowly from her nose and sniffed. The treacly bouquet of Tabu had vanquished the stench. It no longer smelled as if a thousand Holsteins had crapped in her bed. It smelled like a French whorehouse.

But that was an improvement. A whorehouse, I can sleep with, Helen said as she climbed into bed and pulled the sheets up to her head. Cow poop? No way.

Minutes later, it was back. This time, her nightgown had absorbed the reek. She jumped up and flung the offending garment down the stairs before going to wash up in the bathroom. Helen selected a fresh gown from the dresser, slipped it on, and warily, so as not to trouble the midnight air, tiptoed back toward bed. But the odor lingered.

Frustrated and angry, Helen walked over to the window. She was freaking out. All she could think of was that scene in the movie Network when everyday folks, egged on by the crazed TV anchor Howard Beale, run to the window, throw up the sash, and bellow out, "I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!"

Helen seriously considered doing that. But she didn’t dare open the window.

Instead, she peered out into the moonlight and down at her tidy rows of peppers and eggplants planted next to carrots, sweet corn, Brandywine tomatoes, and green patches of herbs. She gazed over the Yakima Valley, an irrigated patchwork of farms, orchards, vineyards, and dairies laid out across the scrubby high desert of south-central Washington. She saw the rich fields of corn, hops, alfalfa, and mint, bordered by wild bitterbrush and horse thistle, leading down toward the meandering Yakima River. Under the blue moonlight, she could see the looming outline of Snipes Mountain, which dominates the landscape from Granger in the west to Sunnyside in the east. On this low escarpment, the Reddouts had planted their seventy-five acres of cherry, pear, apple, and nectarine orchards.

Helen thought back on the years she had spent so happily in this small patch of paradise. But then the big dairies had moved in.

Many in the valley had watched with heavy hearts as family dairies with seventy-five or so cows went out of business, replaced by enormous, corporate-backed behemoths that could milk and feed five thousand or more cows within a single confinement. Over time, many more of these milk factories began appearing in the dry, wide-open valley.

There was no mistaking these newcomers. The old-fashioned dairies had pastured their cows on emerald fields of green, periodically moving the animals through well-timed rotations of meadows brimming with wild clover, alfalfa, downy ryegrass, and other ingredients of a natural bovine buffet. Helen was not exactly enamored of cows, but she had always delighted at watching mothers and their calves gamboling about the green pastures of their valley home. She figured they were doing whatever it is that cows do, at peace in their world. The pastured animals seemed healthy and robust, walking erect with straight spines and heads held high. To Helen, they seemed happy.

But the cows at the new milk factories were nothing like that. Instead, thousands of manure-smeared animals were jammed onto strictly confined tracts of land. Whatever grass had sprouted in these feeding pens was quickly shredded under constant hoof pounding, leaving behind open stretches of dirt, urine, and feces.

In the newfangled dairies, milking cows lined up in long metal buildings called freestyle barns. Outside in the open-air pens, or dry lots, dairymen confined their dry cows—usually pregnant mothers within sixty days of giving birth—and heifers, young females that had not yet calved for the first time.

During the arid summers, dry lots baked and crumbled under the blazing sun. Cows and heifers kicked up clouds of dust laden with ground-up feces and pathogens. Sometimes on windy days, the disgusting brown clouds grew so thick that drivers flipped on their headlights at noon. The winter was even worse. Rain and melting snow mixed with the crap-filled soil and left a thick coating of muck caked onto the cows’ legs, bellies, and udders. Helen watched these creatures, penned in by the thousands, and felt they were the very picture of animal misery.

Without access to a single blade of grass, these new dairy cows depended entirely on trucks that delivered silage, a mixture of milled grains, ground soybean, and fermented cornstalk. Helen knew from her family’s dairy days that grain was no substitute for grass, which ruminants can digest and transform into protein.

Then there were the pools of stinking crap. Each dairy cow produces 120 pounds of wet manure a day—the equivalent of what twenty to forty people would generate.¹ In a pasture-fed system, a farmer budgets up to 1.5 acres per cow. The land acts as a free-range toilet that can absorb the excrement. A confinement dairy does not have that option.

So what was becoming of all that crap? Dry-lot waste was left to cake in the sun and periodically scooped away with front loaders. Waste from the barns and the milking parlors was flushed into the lagoons. Before planting and after the fall harvest, farmers sprayed the liquefied waste onto their fields, spewing gases, pathogens, and particles into the semidesert air. The odor had been horrendous around the valley, though thankfully it had not reached the Reddout household—until now. And though Helen had joined with other neighbors to politely express concern over the smell, one dairyman had growled back at them. If they didn’t like it, they could move, he said, adding: My shit doesn’t stink.

Tonight, sitting at the window, her eyes running, sick to her stomach, Helen made a silent vow to fight back. Until now, Helen admitted, she had only dabbled in the Yakima dairy battles. She’d been a halfhearted volunteer, a farmwife who cared. But on this putrid August night, Helen Reddout was emerging as a new person, a full-fledged warrior activist. I can and I will speak out, she thought. And maybe I might actually change something. Just like that man in Network. He first yelled out, and then someone else yelled, and someone else, until whole cities were filled with cries for change.

This would become her new job, Helen thought. This would be her crusade. She spritzed the room once again with Tabu and climbed back into bed next to her still-sleeping husband. This war, she said as she closed her eyes, is on.

ELMWOOD, ILLINOIS

Karen Hudson was worried about the rain. For days on end in February 2001, the weather in her little town of Elmwood had been wretched even by western Illinois standards. Periods of blinding snows and subfreezing temperatures were followed by warmer wet fronts carrying torrents of rain that fell around the clock. The result was an objectionable mess of icy mud and water, layered over a solid pack of frozen ground.

Karen knew that Inwood, the megadairy outside Elmwood, was about to have a major accident. Investigators had been out to the dairy to see how it was faring in the rough weather and found that its waste lagoon was just inches away from spilling over the rim and down into neighboring fields. A historic Civil War–era cemetery was threatened. Karen learned that dairy workers were frantically piling sandbags around the lagoon’s rim to try to keep it from overflowing.

Local news accounts reported that before they left, investigators had ordered David Inskeep, the owner, to lower the lagoon by at least a million gallons, telling him to load the waste into rented tanker trucks and haul it away, six thousand gallons at a time. He refused.

Instead, after the government men were gone, Inskeep ordered his workers to lay hoses from the lagoon across nearly a mile of land to a long, narrow ravine, where the waste would be pumped and stored. It would end up being the worst livestock spill in Illinois history.

Karen and her husband, Rocky, watched the disaster unfold on the evening news. They saw that the lower end of the ravine was dammed with an earthen berm about ten feet high. Inskeep must have assumed it would be a fitting locale for some of the liquid from his waste lagoon, and he filled it with two million gallons of a foamy, brown-yellow stew.

But the berm didn’t hold. Lagoon waste plunged through the breach and into the West Fork of Kickapoo Creek, which joins the Illinois River near the point where Peoria draws its drinking water. Dead fish were turning up, and the entire area was an environmental disaster zone.

I knew this would happen! Karen cried. "I knew they would mess up that cesspool. Everything we said would come true about this megadairy is coming true. It was neither a joyous nor a victorious emotion. Karen had tried to stop this from happening. She recalled that back in 1997, before the dairy was built, she had naively thought she could talk Dave Inskeep out of his plans. She had invited him over one day to talk neighbor to neighbor over coffee. Don’t do this, Dave, she pleaded. Please don’t put this god-awful animal factory here in Elmwood."

But Inskeep’s mind was made up. Karen, he said sincerely, I’m not going to do anything to hurt this community. Please, trust me. Just keep quiet about this for now, and I promise you, I’m not going to do anything harmful. But Karen was unmoved. Dave, she said, we’ve known each other a long time. We got our dog from you. I taught school with your wife, and she taught my kids. I am asking you not to do this. It’s going to be a disaster.

Inskeep looked hurt. Why are you fighting me? he asked.

I’m not fighting you, Dave. What I’m trying to do, in a neighborly way, is to ask you not to do this to my family and my community, not to build the dairy.

I’m going to do it, Karen. I’ve already decided. I’ve signed the papers.

Well then, I’m going to do everything I can to oppose you.

Do what you feel you need to do, but I am putting this in. Inskeep rose from the table and shook Karen’s hand.

God bless you, Dave, she said. I guess we agree to disagree.

And out he walked, saying only, We’ll be in touch.

Now, four years later, Karen’s jaw went limp as she pondered how her worst premonition was actually transpiring in Elmwood. My God, how could someone do this? she asked. How could Inskeep be so stupid as to just go and pump millions of gallons of crap into a creek? Why didn’t he seek help? That fool is paying the price for his own arrogance.

Karen thought about the twelve hundred acres that she and Rocky farmed just outside Elmwood, where they planted rows of corn and soybeans across gently rolling land that had been in the Hudson family since the 1890s. There, amid the oaks, willows, and wildflowers of the Illinois prairie, they raised food, raised a family, built a home, and built a life.

Elmwood is a pleasant, all-American farming town west of Peoria. People there—farmers, merchants, business types who commute to Peoria, and a few escapees from Chicago—cherish their lives in the Starbucks-free zone. Elmwood exudes a slightly upscale confidence not always found in the hardscrabble prairie towns of the area, where Ronald Reagan once shot high school hoops. Stately storefronts house a hardware store and an old-time drugstore on Elmwood’s tiny Central Park. Under the park’s classic white gazebo, bands draw large families on summer evenings filled with fireflies and the smell of fried chicken.

In 1996, Karen and her neighbors formed a little grassroots group called Families Against Rural Messes, or FARM, in order to fight Dave Inskeep’s dairy—Illinois’ largest. They had issued many dire warnings about the dairy’s waste lagoon and manure management practices. The 1,250-head facility had already been cited for several violations involving land and water pollution, including an incident in late 1997 that had expelled a turbid, gray-colored wastewater with a distinct manure odor into Kickapoo Creek, Karen learned from state reports.

Yet despite all that, Inskeep had now let his lagoon level creep dangerously close to the rim during this season of extraordinary precipitation.

It was time for Karen to get to work. She summoned her FARM colleagues, who by this point had been fighting large-scale hog and dairy confinements for five years. Together they had filed lawsuits, staged protests, and testified at hearings. Those years were long on struggle and short on rewards. But maybe, at last, that would finally change. Maybe Karen could use this disaster to her advantage.

The Illinois media were used to calling Karen whenever a factory farm had an accident. Now her phone would not stop ringing. She spent much of the next few days on the line with reporters, and making trips out to the site for interviews. What Inskeep should have done was call the state and have everyone work out a solution together, she told reporters. But good old Dave, he didn’t think he needed anyone’s help and he refused to hire waste haulers—he thought he could do this on the sly, and on the cheap.

And, she noted, a new problem was besieging the dairy. The state had advised Inskeep to stop pumping any more waste into his lagoon. As a result, according to local media reports, a rising backwash of flush water was now spilling from the barns and milking parlor and pooling into a massive manure lake that engulfed the cattle confinements. The lake, growing by the hour, already held two million gallons of brown stinking water. Workers had to fence off much of the area after Holsteins were found wading around in fetid liquid up to their udders.

Maybe this disaster will finally do something to strengthen the law; maybe this will be precedent setting, Karen told one journalist. But even if that happens, isn’t it sad that it takes a spill to give one hope? She paused a moment, then said, On the other hand, this terrible event has given us a very powerful weapon in the court of public opinion.

Another reporter asked Karen about Inskeep, her neighbor, the man who once gave her family a puppy. We must never forget that Dave Inskeep dumped millions of gallons of waste into our waterways. This is the usual defiant arrogance of factory farmers, she replied without emotion. These events verify exactly what we at FARM have been warning about: Factory farms are dangerous to the environment; they are ticking time bombs of manure just waiting to be spilled into public waters.

It was a tough time for FARM, but Karen’s PR sense paid off handsomely. Aerial photographs and videos shot by group members and local reporters aired on local stations throughout western Illinois. The front page of the Peoria Journal Star was splashed with a four-color aerial photo of the dairy, taken by a FARM volunteer. Later, FARM’s photos would be used by the Illinois attorney general’s office to prosecute the case.

To Karen Hudson, Inwood Dairy was the poster child for what happens when too many animals are concentrated in one place at one time, and managed by someone evidently not up to the task. The way our law is written, the bad actors are allowed to get by for quite a long time until there’s a catastrophic event, she said at a FARM news conference a few days later. All the things we warned about regarding this corporate dairy came to light.

At least she could take comfort from the sick humor spreading around town in response to the giant dairy, which was using Monsanto’s artificial bovine growth hormone, Posilac, to boost milk production by up to 30 percent. Some people were now sporting T-shirts that said, WELCOME TO ELMWOOD. THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH OUR WATER.

Below that was an illustration of two children growing udders.

PART I

RAISING

A STINK

1

Rick Dove loves the Neuse. The cloudy river, two million years old, seems to possess a spiritual quality that he finds irresistible. The Neuse was named after the Neusiok Indians, who thrived along its southern banks before the English began exploring Pamlico Sound in 1585. By the mid-1700s, the Neusiok were nearly gone.

The Neuse is born outside Durham and runs in a southeasterly direction until it reaches New Bern, two hundred miles away, at the juncture of the Trent River. There the water goes brackish, then spreads out for several miles wide before crawling through a forty-mile tidal estuary that empties into Pamlico Sound. At roughly ten miles across, it ranks among the widest river mouths in the continental United States.

Rick always loved rivers. He grew up next to a little tributary of Bear Creek near Dundalk, Maryland—just five miles southeast of Baltimore. As kids, Rick and his buddies would splash around in the creek during the sweaty months of summer. But one afternoon in the 1940s, that dreamy world came to an end. Rick’s mother took her six-year-old by the hand and led him down to the water’s edge. She pointed to a new housing development built upstream. When those people flushed their toilets, she said, it went right into the creek.

You can’t swim here anymore, Rick, she sighed, kissing his forehead.

The six-year-old frowned at the prospect of swimless summers to come. Then his face lit up. Don’t worry, Mom! It’s okay, Rick said. We’ll just go over there and tell them to stop! Many years later, he would remember that day as his start as an environmentalist.

As Rick grew older, his maritime vistas expanded beyond polluted Bear Creek to Chesapeake Bay and the Eastern Shore. His dad built warplanes for the Glen L. Martin Company (now Martin Marietta) and his mom ran a dry cleaning business. Rick and his dad were able to embark on many fishing trips to remote inlets of the sprawling bay.

Rick earned his law degree at age twenty-three from the University of Baltimore in 1963. But the Vietnam War was rumbling, half a world away. Rather than risk being drafted, Rick applied for the marines’ four-year officer program in Quantico, Virginia. He wanted to take orders, and learn how to give a few, he likes to say. Officer boot camp was sixteen weeks long and nearly half his class dropped out—but Rick held on and graduated as a second lieutenant.

In 1964, Rick married his childhood sweetheart, Joanne Rose Tezak, and, after he passed the Maryland bar, Rick and his bride were stationed at the Marine Corp Recruit Depot in Parris Island, South Carolina, where he worked as a judge advocate in a law office. Soon after that, Rick signed up as a career officer in the marines. He was then sent to a big naval base at Yokosuka, Japan, where he and his platoon guarded against demonstrators protesting U.S. nuclear ships docking in the harbor. Rick was grudgingly impressed by the passionate activists.

Rick did two tours of duty in the Vietnam War and took incoming missiles on his first night in-country. Eventually, he ended up working as a defense counsel in a supply depot called Red Beach, not too far from Denang. There he defended marines who had been court-martialed for murder, fragging, and rape.

By 1972, Rick was stateside again, working as a marine liaison to Congress during the final years of the war. He and Joanne lived in Washington, D.C., and adopted two children, Todd and Holly. In 1975, Rick transferred to the Marine Corps Air Station at Cherry Point, North Carolina, fifteen miles southeast of New Bern, on a wide bend in the Neuse River.

The fishing, Rick quickly learned, was incredible. The Neuse feeds river water and nutrients into the Albemarle and Pamlico sounds estuarine system, a vast nursery for 90 percent of all commercial species caught in North Carolina. Its feeder streams and shady backwater creeks provide spawning areas for herring, shad, and striped bass. Much like salmon, these fish live as adults in the open sea but swim upriver when it comes time to spawn.

Rick became the staff judge advocate for the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing at Cherry Point, and in 1983 the family settled into a Mediterranean-style home right on the Neuse, in the prosperous subdivision of Carolina Pines. Rick built a wooden deck and a good-size pier out on the water, and purchased his dreamboat: a twenty-three-foot riverboat with a 200 horsepower engine manufactured by Hydro-Step Corporation. Designed to carry extra weight, she was perfect for crabbing, when a full cargo could reach two thousand pounds or more.

Life could not have been sweeter. America was at peace, and the river was swollen with bass, flounder, crab, and shrimp. They were so bountiful, Rick couldn’t give them away to his neighbors. Now a colonel in the marines, he told Joanne that one day he would retire from the Corps and launch a fishing business right from his backyard. Rick loved the Neuse so much that when he was transferred to serve as a military judge at Camp Lejeune, fifty-five miles to the south, he chose the two-hour daily commute over moving off the river.

Nothing could keep Rick from the Neuse, not even when he began forgetting things after spending his days on the river in the fall of 1986. It wasn’t simple memory loss, like forgetting where you put your car keys. He couldn’t remember which courtroom he worked in, or find his way back to chambers from the law library. Rick was convinced he had a brain tumor. But doctors found nothing wrong with him. He took some time off to recuperate, and within three weeks, the problems abated and he returned to the bench.

At the same time, Rick began noticing that some of the menhaden in the Neuse were turning up dead, with open, bleeding lesions on their silvery flanks. It would be years before he understood the connection between his memory loss and the ghoulish fish kills.

In June 1987, Colonel Richard Dove turned in his retirement papers and walked out of Camp Lejeune’s main gate, leaving the Marine Corps behind. Rick could have waited five years for full retirement benefits. But all he wanted was to grab his son, Todd, jump in his boat, and go be a fisherman on the Neuse.

Rick and Todd rigged up the boat into an operable commercial fishing vessel. They bought a seventeen-foot fishing skiff that was ideal for crabbing and christened it the Little Dipper. Rick rented a store in nearby Havelock and opened a fish market, Todd’s Seafood. The catch was consistently generous and the customers voracious. Business boomed.

For two years, Rick lived in bliss. But in the autumn of 1989, he again noticed dying fish turning up in his own seafood catches. The lesions began appearing on menhaden, but quickly spread to other species.

Then the sores started to appear on people.

One day Todd pointed out to his dad a couple of puzzling red spots on his hands and lower leg. Rick didn’t think too much of it—until he found similar spots on his own forearm the next day. Within days, their wounds had grown into weepy open sores, and no antibiotic seemed to make them go away. Rick and Todd realized that anywhere they got wet, they got lesions. Whatever was killing the fish was now stalking them.

Then, in 1990, more than two million fish perished in the Neuse River from August through October. These are the months that the menhaden gather for their annual exodus to the Atlantic. Rick knew that the massive fish migration is nature’s way of exporting excess nutrients out of the Neuse River Basin. Throughout the year, young menhaden gorge themselves on tons of plant material that end up in creeks and streams feeding the river and estuary. In the late summer or early fall, a billion or more menhaden converge to swim en masse out to the ocean. Once there, they breed and then die, releasing stored-up nitrogen and phosphorus into the open waters. But when millions of fish instead die prematurely in the Neuse, those excess nutrients remain where they are.

Rick began to hear other fishermen around New Bern speaking of odd experiences on the water. Their problems went beyond skin sores. Some suffered from memory loss and worse. Some